Don't be too surprised if you wake up to a light coating of snow tomorrow. I know that the timing is very coincidental, and I would personally love for this to be an April Fool's joke, but I promise that it isn't. A pulse of snow is currently rippling across the central US. This system will skirt across some of the northeastern states tomorrow morning producing a thin swath of light to moderate snow. In New York, the best snow chances/higher accumulations will be to our south from southern Orange County over into Westchester.

Here in Ulster County, we'll be toward the northern edge of the storm system, but a few hours of snowfall appears likely during the morning with a coating to two inches of snow likely in Kingston. The extreme range for this event is 0 inches (if the storm passes about 30 miles further south than anticipated) to about 4 inches (if we get caught in heavier snowfall rates). This storm is moving quickly and the timing will be limited from about 5am/6am Monday through about 10am/11am Monday. Temperatures will top out around 50 today, and will only dip down to about 30 tonight before rebounding to around 40 Monday afternoon - this combined with the relatively short duration of any snow should help to limit road impacts, but slick conditions should be expected for the early morning.

Kingston schools (along with Marlboro) are still on spring break, so the probabilities shown are for the remaining Ulster County school districts. Here's a link to current radarhttp://www.intellicast.com/Local/WxMap.aspx

An update will be posted at 10PM

Winter Recap
3PM Friday March 23rd

This winter Kingstonsnows issued its first ever season snow forecast. The forecast was issued on December 12th and called for "a slightly above average" season with a forecast total of 48 inches of snow. As of March 23rd, the season's actual total is 46 inches, which is "slightly above average". For context, the amount of snowfall in a single winter has ranged anywhere from 11 to 72 inches over the past thirteen years. The forecast was based on the science of previous years, and appears to have been endorsed by luck. The overall average temperature from December 1st through March 22nd was 30 degrees, which is one degree above average.

Highlights

First snow: December 9th

New Year's Cold Wave: Very cold air the last week of December and first week of January. During these two weeks the average temperature was only 11.5 degrees, and we rang in the new year with a temperature of -10. The cold peaked at -14 degrees on January 7th. Seven daily record cold temperatures were set during this arctic outbreak.

January whip-lash: Less than a week after our Cold Wave temperatures rose to a maximum of 62 on January 12th. The 12th and 13th set three record warm temperatures.

January 17th Snowstorm: 8.0 inches; second biggest snowfall of the season.

February Heatwave: No notable snow events occurred in February, but the month did feature unusual warmth. The heat peaked February 21st as the temperature reached 76 degrees! This was the warmest temperature ever recorded locally in February, surpassing the previous record of 74 which was set just last year. At the time, it was only two degrees short of the warmest February temperature ever recorded in all of New York State (78) - La Guardia airport down in NYC broke the state record by recording 79 the same day.

February Whiplash: 1.1 inches of snow fell February 22nd. The high temperature the previous day was 76 degrees.

March Nor'easters: Four major nor'easters affected the northeastern states. Each one dropped a maximum of over two feet of snow in various locations keeping us on our toes, but Ulster County got pretty lucky. Of all four nor'easters the only one that really "got us" was on March 7th. 10.5 inches of snow fell during this storm making it our greatest snowfall of the season, and out 10th biggest snowfall since at least November 2004. The first nor'easter on March 2nd produced about 1.9 inches of rain in Kingston.

Thank you for following along on this wintry ride; I hope you enjoyed this winter as much as I did.